Hacker News Reader

Comment by crcsmnky | Hacker News Reader

"Basically we felt that we wanted to prove you don’t have to charge $600 to deliver a phone that has the latest-generation technologies."

That's disingenuous. Without LTE this phone does not have the latest generation technologies. I think Google screwed up with the Nexus 4. The previous Nexus phones were definitely flagship, top of the line devices. This one is already obsolete before it even ships.

View on HN

Calling something that ships with HSPA+ "obsolete" stikes me as slightly over the top, it's still capable of 42Mbps, and there was a relatively recent test [1] which showed T-Mobile's HSPA+ running faster than Verizon.

1 - http://www.phonearena.com/news/T-Mobiles-HSPA-42Mbps-network...

Most of the world does not have much LTE deployed yet. Large parts of the world has not even begun rollouts. By the time LTE penetration is widespread, current generation phones bought on subsidised contracts will start coming up for renewal/replacement.

Yes, if you're somewhere with decent LTE coverage, you may want to consider alternatives, but that's not a concern for most of us.

I & millions of others will be proving you wrong this winter.

Though I can afford a $500-700 device, but I can't justify it. Meanwhile, one of the big battery life tips for smartphone owners is to disable 4G. So, no Google has not screwed up.

Perhaps, but for those of us on carriers that don't support LTE in our area, we're salivating at the prospect of getting a flagship phone without having to pay a premium for LTE support. Those who need LTE can get the Optimus G. It may not be a Nexus phone, but its similarity to the Nexus 4 should mean that both LG & Cyanogen should be quick to port the latest versions of Android to it.

I think for most of the world, you're lucky to have reliable 3G and HSPA+. I don't particularly care about LTE.

I feel the same way about LTE myself, but they can still sell to T-mobile and most non-US markets, at least. For a while there everyone had to go Qualcomm to do LTE, which made the price very high. Only recently did Samsung manage to pair their Exynos processor with LTE and HTC managed to pair NVIDIA with LTE. The generation before that, HTC One X used Qualcomm in the US and NVIDIA in world wide edition, and Samsung also had a Qualcomm entry. Apple famously just took a really long time to go LTE. Samsung and HTC work very hard to get into carrier stores, and in the US that means LTE, so they were pretty much forced to adopt it before it was cheap and different options were competing with each other.

LTE is not widely available. Where ever it is available its unreliable and inconsistent. You can have LTE chip but what would it do if there is no network.

That might be true in general, but I do have perfect LTE (Verizon) coverage almost everywhere I go -- on campus, downtown, or near my apartment. I have unlimited data and can setup my phone to tether, so it's really kind of amazing.

I didn't realize how much faster LTE was until I downloaded an ubuntu ISO in 7 minutes. It's far superior to any sort of wired internet connection I could reasonably afford.

I'm not saying google should have included LTE, but in some regions like mine, it turns out to be pretty important.

Living in Vancouver, BC; LTE has a few weak spots here, but in general LTE is fast and reliable, and gets me download and upload speeds of between 20-30 megabits per second. It's a faster download than my fibre connection to my apartment (by 20%), and faster upload (by 200%).

I'd say that's pretty significant. I get that Google maybe can't fit an LTE chip into a phone cheaply, and that LTE is the card that carriers are willing to withhold playing to get concessions out of Google, but saying that LTE unavailable, unreliable, and inconsistent just sounds like the sort of apologetics that iPhone users have been accused of for years (since back when LTE was unavailable, unreliable, and inconsistent).

Either I'm incredibly unlucky, or phone support of 4g is not the issue. I've yet to be in a city where my phone was able to connect to 4g, even though the phone itself supports it.

Hm, are you sure you don't have 4g disabled? What provider/phone do you have? I have a Galaxy Nexus on Verizon and I get 4g almost everywhere that I'm willing to call a city.

Usually, I do have it disabled, because otherwise it just wastes my battery. But I try the 4g whenever I go to a new city. I have a Motorola photon on sprint. I live in Wisconsin.

Nexus has been shipping obsolete cameras forever. LTE isn't as big a deal in comparison.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com